Anara Guard - like a complete unknown, Chicago, 1969

 Like A Complete Unknown by Anara Guard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Published 17 November, 2022, The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat as "War is Obsolete."

     War. “HUNH! What is it GOOD FOR? Ab os lute lee NOTHIN!”* Who is it that thinks it’s still useful? And worth spending 3.7% or more of our gross domestic product on as of 2020? (Stockholm International Peace Institute, Wikipedia) And risking global climate change and nuclear disasters?
      I’ve been mulling over these questions for at least 50 years now, and wanted to read like a complete unknown by Sacramento’s Anara Guard about wartime, Vietnam, from one woman and one man's perspectives among about half a dozen characters, set in metropolitan Chicago 1969-70. As a cis-gendered, heterosexual female who had grown up due north (Milwaukee) only about two years earlier than Katya, one of Guard’s main characters, I had a hard time “emotionally distancing myself” from the “novel,” but maybe that’s the point. 

(photo, Chicago's Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention Anti- Vietnam War Protest, by Victor Albert Grigas, NBC News, before the arrests and police riot.)
     The music she references (The Doors' “When you’re strange,” “When the moon is in the seventh house” from Hair, etc.), the clothing (jeans, army surplus, embroidered sheepskin vest) and definitely the weather (hot, sweaty, humid summer; cold, brutal winter, wind off Lake Michigan) spoke to every memory of my late teen and early 1970s years. And the conundrums and quandaries of being an intelligent, creative, rebellious, extremely naïve young woman expected by her parents only to “get a good husband” in a brave new world full of global literature, film and TV images; sex, drugs and rock and roll. She gripped me like a pair of Beatle boots from the back of the closet that had shrunk up tight. Ouch!
      I could have “ended up like” that. The whole thing, especially the last third, gripped me viscerally every time Katya came into view – I could have been like that. I WAS like that! rang through my brain, heart and body as she went through totally unnecessary physical, emotional, social, economic and mental suffering as a gross injustice for her trust, love, kindness, sensitivity, sexuality and compassion.
      Guard selects action in the last few chapters that is ALL immediate, ALL tooth-grindingly physical and relationship-bound, climaxing in childbirth and "finding a new life." Is that “the difference between girls and boys?” Do we really have different foci and “value systems?” Experiences and expectations in society and/ because of thOur biological lives? Or was it all the 1950s (conservative, Western, sexist, racist...) culture crashing up against the "counter-cultural revolution" going on around us?
 

     Her other, older, very sympathetic, male main character is so good at heart, missing his dead wife so much and being so truly, unassumingly HELPFUL where her erotic partner was NOT shows a good contrast in possibilities. 

An excellent first novel. May there be many more!

* Written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong for the Motown label in 1969, Edwin Starr was the vocalist when “War” was a number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1970. https://genius.com/Edwin-starr-war-ly...


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